I picked the nicest place I could find for our one last night before Bruce left for two weeks. I should have paused and reconciled the price with the fact that we would be glamping in a tent. It was called ULUM Moab but it was not actually in Moab.
We passed the turnoffs for Canyonlands National Park and Arches National Park. We drove through downtown Moab with restaurants and shops. After continuing twenty miles, the turn was barely visible. It brought us onto a dirt road, the kind with a washboard that makes the van and all of its contents vibrate no matter how fast or slow it rolls. This made the thirty-five minutes feel more like fifty minutes. The van rattled, and it sounded like every screw holding the bike rack together was loosening its grip.
Finally, a tiny oasis of buildings that were camouflaged appeared in the middle of nowhere. The sky went on forever with fluffy clouds on top of azure blue and further away dark clouds with gray streaks reaching down to the earth. There were horseshoe-shaped soft red cliffs that made the landscape feel gentle. Inside the horseshoe were tents barely noticeable. Besides the vast expanse of sky there was a smooth red rock that stuck out with a hole in the middle. You could see the rainstorms through the hole in the rock.
We had dinner on the patio and listened to a musician playing country music. He wore a cowboy hat and had a long white beard. He seemed wise. After he finished, the waitstaff came over to talk to him as though he was a celebrity. We asked our waiter a question about what this place was before it became a glamping hotel with tents. The musician, who had lived in the area for forty-seven years, answered. He said it was a ranch and the holes cut into the sides of the cliffs were called cowboy caves blasted by the cowboys themselves.
The musician-historian packed up his guitar case. We walked out from under the dinner canopy and stood with our mouths open peering up at the dark sky. There were so many stars. They reached all the way to the horizon in every direction. It was like standing in a snow globe but the snow was stars. There was one area of so many that they looked like a cloudy strip across the sky. I realized I was seeing the Milky Way for the first time.
We made our way, alternating from looking up at the sky and down at the dark path. We finally arrived at our tent. Yes, tent. At first it seemed really cozy. It had a wood stove with a pile of wood to burn. The bathroom had a stand-up shower, toilet, and canvas walls. We collapsed in the king-sized bed after all the driving leading to this moment and looked forward to a peaceful night.
In the quiet of the dark night, the tent sounded like it was breathing. The wind would suck the walls in and snap them out. Every time this happened the zipper would rattle as if someone was coming into the tent. The wind increased and the gentle breathing turned into an angry snap that sometimes shook the bed. I drifted to sleep and woke up with every breath of the tent, shake of the bed, and rattle of the zipper.
The gray rain clouds finally made their way over the horseshoe-shaped red rocks that our tent was nestled into. The thunder rumbled and then it echoed and bounced off the wall of rock that surrounded us. The tent walls lit up, the thunder boomed, and the noise reverberated.
Meanwhile, about a quarter of a mile away in a dirt lot, our van was sitting there. It was an empty capsule of peace and quiet. We both said it at the same time, “One more loud thunder or one more snap of this tent that also shakes the bed, we go to the van.” After about three loud booms, we finally gathered our essentials and walked quickly down to the van.
On the way we made it a point to notice the other tents. Were they breathing loudly too? We could not believe that other people could sleep through the noise their tents were making. We took a turn down a dark path and I said, “This is just the time where we might see a chupacabra.” We still stopped and admired the sky. After we assembled the bed, which is never a fun job on the best of days, we crawled in exhausted.
Bruce quietly left the van at 6:30 a.m. and I kept on sleeping until I could feel the hot sun through the black shades. Both of us were wrecked. Bruce had two meetings that morning. Over our second cup of coffee, we both commented on how fresh the other patrons looked at breakfast. Some of them wandered off down trails from the hotel. They must have been fresh enough for a long hike because we were in the middle of nowhere.
I never made it back to the tent because checkout was at 10 a.m. If we wanted to stay until 11 a.m. it would cost $50. So, I showered in the bathrooms near the pools while Bruce had his meetings on an empty patio. As it turns out, we ended up spending $800 to sleep in our own glamping van.
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